How much time people spend sifting through junk email and how much patience they have for this new bargain-basement marketing technique is being gauged by three Net advocacy groups that will present their findings to the Federal Trade Commission in June.
"We are putting the information together in a way that we hope will help the FTC make an informed decision on how to deal with spamming," said Scott Brower, executive director of Electronic Frontiers Florida. The group is conducting the spamming survey online with the Voters Telecommunication Watch and Electronic Frontier Foundation in Austin, Texas..
Between 50 to 100 individuals and Internet service providers have responded to the informal survey since it was posted on the VTW site last Tuesday. Comments on the results will be filed with the FTC in May and discussed at agency hearings in June. The survey asks how much spamming costs users and ISPs in time and money, how annoying they find it, and what steps they take, if any, to eliminate it from in boxes.
"Resolving the spam issue is a very delicate balance of different factors, including how people are using email and the protection of free commercial speech - not to mention the free flow of information on the Net," said Shabbir Safdar, co-founder of the Voters Telecommunication Watch, which is compiling the survey results.
While many users tackle spamming on their own, some ISPs provide filtering services. Panix, a New York-based ISP with some 6,000 clients, maintains a database of spammers and filters junk mail through proc mail so the user never has to see it, or can dump it into a separate inbox.
Victoria Fike, Panix's "abuse coordinator," spends one to four hours a day adding and taking away addresses from Panix's blacklist of spammers. Fike says spammers come in three forms: the established spamming company where spamming is a business venture; the "fugitive, fly-by-night operation" offering get-rich-quick schemes that is constantly switching email addresses as it gets kicked off servers; and the mainstream companies that try spamming once because they think it's a great marketing tool until they get their hands slapped by ISPs.
And, as more marketers take to the Internet, the FTC is considering banning spamming altogether - just as fax spamming was outlawed in the 1980s. But Safdar says that would be a mistake.
Unlike fax spamming, email spamming doesn't deny the user access to a communications appliance, Safdar says. In addition, who is paying for delivery of the junk email is not as clear-cut. "It's not appropriate to blindly take existing laws and apply them to the Internet," he said.
